I never stopped using Sublime Text so I suppose I am cool again.
Fine, I'll build my own text editor
131–140 of 264 posts
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong
He created Go because he believed that the average Google programmer is too stupid to program in C++, and he didn't like Java, the other language created to address this problem.
Bullshit. He describes the actual reasons here: https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_4.
And anyway, since when is not liking something a bad reason to try your hand at creating a better thing?
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#133Text editing is a solved problem. It's not about the style of cursor, or if rope is used or not. We already have answers to that. It's about remote editing, LSP support.
> Text editing is a solved problem. Not even close. Obvious from the fact that about >90% of text editors out there have visible _lag_ when inputting or modifying text. Visible _LAG_. (see emacs, nvim in certain configurations, vscode, sublime, etc) A text editor should be running at DRAM read/write speeds nowadays (amortized), which effectively means that any form of edits you do should be imperceptible to you.
I use Emacs and the edits I do seem imperceptible to me. Do you know of any test I should try to see whether the lag is notable and intrusive?
Emacs does start fairly slowly, though, takes about 0.6 seconds.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Text editing is a solved problem. Not even close. Obvious from the fact that about >90% of text editors out there have visible _lag_ when inputting or modifying text. Visible _LAG_. (see emacs, nvim in certain configurations, vscode, sublime, etc) A text editor should be running at DRAM read/write speeds nowadays (amortized), which effectively means that any form of edits you do should be imperceptible to you.
I use Emacs and the edits I do seem imperceptible to me. Do you know of any test I should try to see whether the lag is notable and intrusive? Emacs does start fairly slowly, though, takes about 0.6 seconds.
I would love to see your config!
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#135So apparently every half-serious coder will write at least one chess engine and a text editor. Any other program type which gets implemented over-and-over again?
If you hang out here, you've probably tried to write a HN clone or client.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#136Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the sc…
It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong
There is a correlation between having strong opinions and sounding like a dick. But also between having strong opinions and having impact.
Luckily there are also people who manage to have impact while giving out a different vibe
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#137> [...] is promising but I’ve noticed strange [...]
In a nutshell, the perpetual experience of writing your own (web) text editor.
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#138The single most disappointing fact about (more or less) all text editors on the market today is how god awful their performance is. For most text editors, and when I say most I really do mean _most_, you can very easily start seeing noticeable lag and stuttering when making modifications, or even outright INPUT LAG when entering text. For very tiny buffers 1MB, 99% of them are unusable due to a) writes taking SECONDS…
Large files lagging editors is usually because the entire file needs to be parsed for the editor to know how the syntax highlighting and error reporting should work.
Making that random big_file and opening it and editing it should be trivial under any editor (works perfectly fine under Emacs because it gets opened in fundamental mode, even opening it in hexl (hex editor) mode is fine), opening a 40M JSON file is a different can of worms (because it's a larger file Emacs will offer to open it in fundamental mode anyway, which means sacrificing QOL features for performance).
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I just assume that downvotes without explanation just mean that I am right and that has somehow made someone unhappy. Unless I've been deliberately bait-y, which does sometimes happen, of course. Sometimes I reread later I realise that I've come across in an unpleasant manner that I did not intend, or I misunderstood and my comment is irrelevant, necessary, or occasionally just plain wrong. The real fun comes when yo…
Hah. Yes. The one-dimensional up/down mechanism leaves a lot to be desired. Your response could be so wildly engaging that literally everyone on HN has voted on it; so controversial that the masses and the bots are evenly split between loving and hating it; and so immaculately well-written that no one can think of anything to add or to counter it with which wouldn't embarrass themselves. That's usually what I tell myself after I get a single downvote and no reply ;)
Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor
#140The author travels the same path that ended up eventually with VS Code.
Reminds me strongly of Marjin Haverbeke's talk at Full Frontal conf in 2011: https://ffconf.org/talks/respectable-code-editing-in-the-bro... - Using Canvas, then contenteditable, and then DOM.
Haverbeke went on to create CodeMirror and ProseMirror.